Social Aspects of the Game Development Process in the Global Gam Jam

Abstract

Game jamming is a valuable tool and process to connect game developers from a range of disciplines such as art, programming, audio engineering, or story-telling. The Global Game Jam ® (GGJ) thus fundamentally supports the process of connecting people, and forms a basis for studying teamwork formation and -mechanics. It is an annual event, where participants (jammers) meet on physical locations to develop games together within a short time-span of 48 hours. People with similar interest but diferent skill-sets have the chance to meet and collaborate to create prototypes of games together, whether digital or analog. In this explorative study, data from the GGJ website across four years of game jams and their participants are analyzed, towards investigating group interaction and group forming behavior. The focus is on using social network analysis and social metrics to evaluate the inluence of a) jammer skillset and b) jam locations, on social and communicative structures among game jammers in the GGJ environment. The indings suggest that diferent skill-sets support diferent forms of social structures and also setups in countries refer to diferent group sizes and diferent social structures.

Two Decades of Game Jams

“…Their research also shows that jammers are likely to have worked with other jammers they have previously worked with. Pirker et al expanded this work with an even deeper social network analysis [105]. The work also demonstrates that jammers with skills such as audio and art tend to have a higher degree compared to programmers for instance.…”